Happy
by Rory Forrester
Summary: she would always remember the summer that Ryan Atwood arrived in Newport Beach. [oneshot].


A/N: this is just a random little one-shot that came out of nowhere. I hope you like it!

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She would always remember the summer that Ryan Atwood arrived in Newport Beach; it was forever emblazoned in her mind. And not just because it resulted in bringing Ryan into her life.

That summer had been unbearably hot. The air itself felt sticky, and the air was always heavy with tension, as if any sudden movement might cause a violent change. You could say that the weather was a microcosm for the Newport macrocosm that summer.

The days all felt the same. They were static, stale. Heavy with tension. Marissa and Summer shopped in the morning, tanned in the afternoon, partied in the evenings. Marissa passed out at night. That was their routine. She pretended to be happy.

But underneath everything, underneath it all, she could feel the tension bubbling. She knew that something was not right with her dad. She could sense it. But she just went placidly about her business, pretending she was happy and her family was fine.

But she wasn't happy, and she was growing tired of pretending. She was confused as hell and she didn't understand why she wasn't happy. She had everything: money, looks, 'happy' family, popular boyfriend, loyal best friends, and good grades. It all felt so fake, though.

Like Luke. He was the same as every single other boy in Newport Beach. That in itself wasn't a fault, but it still bothered her. Why was she dating him? Because she always had.

Or Holly. Sure, Holly was one of her best friends. But Holly seemed so fake, so plastic. So happy with their perfect lives. All Holly cared about was drinking, partying and boys.

Her family. Her father was hiding something, and she knew it. What it was, she had no idea. She could sense the growing tension between her parents, too. She never would've confided in her mother, and she knew something wasn't right with her father, so she didn't confide in him either.

Summer. She sensed Summer felt the same way, maybe. Like maybe the way life was wasn't the way it should be. Like their life was too fake, and that they were tired of being perfect. But she had no way of knowing for sure, so she kept her unhappiness to herself. 

The days surrounding and leading up to his arrival were the hottest of them all, culminating in the hottest day of the summer, August 20th.

It was on that sticky August day that Ryan Atwood first stepped into Marissa Cooper's life, a life he would forever alter.

She had known, from the minute she woke up, bathed in sweat, that something was going to happen today.

It wasn't like she had woken up in a drastically different way from normal. It was noon, she had a raging hangover and the sun was shining. A typical day in her life.

But as the day progressed and the heat mounted, she could feel that this wouldn't last much longer. The heat. The tension. Her perfect life.

She had no way of knowing that her whole world would come crashing down on her in a few weeks, however.

So that evening, as she watched the handsome stranger at the bottom of the driveway, she felt nothing but overwhelming excitement. Something was happening. Something interesting. Something new. Something to break the endless, relentless procession of identical days.

And something was happening, and it certainly ended the identical days. At first, she was happy. She'd always been looking for an excuse to leave those Newport parties behind, and so she did. Summer needed more persuading. Summer had gotten frightened, and so she'd just begun to pretend harder (She'd come around…eventually.).

But then she'd been angry. She'd wanted everything to go back to normal. She'd blamed Ryan. It was Ryan's fault that her dad went bankrupt. It was Ryan's fault that she slept with Luke, and then he cheated on her. It was Ryan's fault that her parents were getting divorced. It was Ryan's fault that Holly betrayed her.

But it wasn't. These events had always been waiting to happen. They'd only needed something to provoke them, something to break down the perfect Newport façade.

And that something came in the form of a car-stealing, cigarette-smoking, fistfight-getting-into felon with a heart of gold, Ryan Atwood.

It was months later when Marissa realized that she was happy. She didn't have a perfect life anymore; in fact, hers was rather flawed. But she was happy.

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